Best Of the Web: Talking To Children, Belly Fat, Uber For Snitching and more…

I come across so many great articles on the web, so I thought I’d try to regularly share the best ones. Let me know if you like the selection or if you like more (or less) of certain types.

Personality and Self-Help (6)

How Emotional Intelligence Boosts Your Endurance
A new paper has found that those who were better at recognizing and regulating their emotions ran faster races. Runners who agreed with statements like “Expressing my emotions with words is not a problem for me” or “I often pause and think about my feelings.” turned out to be the strongest predictor of their race time the next day

Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children
Fred Rogers fronted a long-running US children’s’ TV show called “Mister Roger’s Neighbourhood”. Through his work with kids, he refined his method of communication with children. His approach could be reduced to 9 rules. It could easily be applied to adults too.

Health and Nutrition (5)

The Most Effective Personal Anti-Aging Program
Scientist Josh Mitteldorf is setting up a study to assess all the main approaches to extending life. The blog contains a comprehensive list of these from relationships to anti-inflammatories to fasting. Great primer.

A tiny tweak to sugar is about to make the world’s sweets a lot healthier
Sugary foods like cake and cookies are very inefficient at delivering the sensation of sweetness. Only 20% of the sugar molecules reach the sweet-sensing receptors on the tongue, its tip. But a new start-up DouxMatok may have found a solution by using sugar-loaded silica which would deliver more of the sugar molecule to the tip of the tongue. So less, but sweeter, sugar.

Tech (5)

Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not
Japan’s Shinto heritage results in the belief that humans are not particularly “special” rather spirits are in everything from rocks to tools to people. And robots. The essay goes on to talk about the evolution of western attitudes to nature, where farming led to humans believing they were superior to nature and hence the dichotomy between man and robot.

Uber but for snitching
A new app that allows users to report crimes or suspicious activity to the police. It has run into racial profiling issues.

Are Smartphones Speeding Up Gentrification?
New research finds that apps like Yelp and Foursquare are making it easier for people to discover out-of-the-way shops and restaurants and maybe encouraging people to move to these neighbourhoods. Mobile data from these sources are also being used for developers to plan where to open mixed use buildings.

Evolving Floorplans
I’m always intrigued by how tech can be applied to “non-tech” industries like construction. This research project uses genetic algorithms to optimise floor plans according to things like minimised walking distances, uses of hallways and so on. Another recent storycovers how Ai is being used to predict construction worker safety.

Queen bees and the microbial fountain of youth
Worker bees and queens have identical genes but worker bees live for a few weeks, while queens live for years. The difference could be due to differences in their gut bacteria (microbiomes). A growing body of research suggests humans are also deeply affected by gut bacteria.

Atomism is basic: emergence explains complexity in the Universe
Useful summary of the latest thinking on emergence the idea that the behaviour of larger systems cannot be explained by knowing the behaviour of their individual components. For example, the behaviour of a mob cannot be understood by knowing each individual in the mob, but rather it has its own dynamics.

Poor education associated with widening inequality in US vs Europe
The latest World Inequality Report shows that the top 1% in the US and Western Europe had a 10% share of national income in 1980, but now they have over 20% in the US, while it has stayed about the same in Europe (page 8). The main reasons for the difference in the US are “due to massive educational inequalities, combined with a tax system that grew less progressive despite a surge in top labor compensation since the 1980s, and in top capital incomes in the 2000s”. Another blog finds that health inequality is not connected to income inequality but rather determined by healthcare systems.

The Three Languages of Politics
A good summary of the book with this title. It argues that the left-right spectrum is less useful to understand politics than before. Instead, it should be filtered through three lenses: oppressor-oppressed (progressives, helping underprivileged), civilisation-barbarism (conservatives, western tradition is good), liberty-coercion (libertarians, individual rights paramount).

Global Supply Chains: See No Evil
Excellent essay on the global supply chain. Argues that it depends on modularity where each part of the chain is modular, interchangeable and invisible to the next part of the chain. This results in it being very difficult to have a global view of a product. Blockchain, internet of things and machine learning will not change that.